Wednesday, April 27, 2016

My time travel argument

It was around this time of year in 1989 when I got into a stupid fight about time travel.

Only I could do that, right?

It was in physics class. I brought up an argument that Stephen Hawking made right around then. Hawking said something to the effect of "Time travel is not possible. If it were, we would be talking to people from the future by now." My friend Brad said, "You're wrong on that point." Even though it wasn't really "my" point, I stupidly took umbrage with it. Brad said, "If someone told you they were from the future, would you believe them?"

What did I say? "Someone believed Marty McFly...and they even made a movie about it."

Like I said. Stupid. Especially now that I consider that Brad was rather more on target than Stephen Hawking. Would you believe them? Now admittedly, if the right hottie in a coffeeshop tells me she's a time traveler, I'll pretty much believe that...or anything else...she says. It does however beg a question. It would be tricky, but if the would-be time traveler were careful and savvy enough to avoid interactions that might negate his/her own future, why couldn't they be among us? In fact, keeping to themselves might not only be desirable but vital to the process.

Now that says nothing about how one might actually execute such travel. But even that is getting slightly less theoretical. Only slightly, but it's a start. If wormholes are possible, then all bets may be off. Besides, there's all manner of anachronisms that keep the evidence piling up, right?

I kid, I kid. Seriously though, time travel might be a possible explanation for UFO activity or at least a portion of. That is Charles Penniston's rationale, for better or worse, for what he claims to have experienced in Rendlesham Forest. It would also explain why such incidents might be covered up as the government would not want us to know about time travelers than they would ETs.

Time travel is not a subject I care for much, either in fiction or Fortean contemplation, other than the occasional one-off piece. The point of it all though?

Brad? If you're out there reading, know this: You can now brag about kicking Stephen Hawking's ass.

1 comment:

On FB, Toby said: "I am skeptical about backwards time travel since you need an absolute frame of reference to get back to any one point in time. We can already do forward time travel within (each of) our own immediate universe. Relativistic travel places one, within the context of their own local timespace, in the future relative to observers. Time shift occurs from both frames of reference, as does the 'time-space cone' of subsequent events. It really is time travel.ala Interstellar... or even Star Trek. When they're traveling at impulse, they're aging more slowly than the rest of the universe from the universe's point of view."

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I'm a writer, scholar, and researcher in the Chicago area. I have an M.A. in Writing from DePaul University. What do I write? Science fiction mostly. What do I research? Rhetoric and composition theory, all things Fortean...as well as other unpopular things.
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